An aspect of modern disaster recover workflows is the ability to control network configuration for virtual machines when they are migrated to a remote site (e.g., from one cluster to another cluster), and then restarted on the remote site. The networks, and hence network configurations (e.g., IP addresses, ports used, etc.), differ from site to site and, accordingly, a migrated virtual machine would need to be reconfigured so as to match the configuration of the network that is present at, and accessed from, the remote site. Furthermore, virtual machines can be started on remote sites under different hypervisors, which might require still additional reconfiguration of the migrated virtual machines.
Hypervisors vary widely in their capabilities and configuration from site to site, and hypervisor implementations do not provide any standardized way to reconfigure network access on behalf of a migrated virtual machine. Legacy approaches sometimes involve use of a hypervisor backdoor, however not all hypervisors support such a backdoor; moreover, for security and other reasons, administrator and/or guest credentials are needed for backdoor or other private network accesses. Some legacy configurations permit changing the IP address of a guest, however this legacy technique still fails to provide any standardized way to reconfigure the network on behalf of a migrated virtual machine. Some legacy techniques implement a dynamic host configuration scheme, however that technique fails to consider static IP installations. Some legacy techniques involve manual reconfigurations, however that does not scale well as the number of virtual machine gets larger and/or the frequency of migrations increase.
What is needed is a technique or techniques to improve over legacy approaches.